Lack of Iraq Government ‘Embarrassing’

By Agence France Presse (AFP) and The Daily Star– The lack of a government nearly five months on from parliamentary elections is “embarrassing” and is impeding any long-term decision-making, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari told AFP on Thursday.

Zebari said the government had begun to “drift” and had consequently not taken strategic decisions, adding that he had avoided several foreign visits because he could not explain to other countries why no new government has yet been formed in Baghdad. “It’s embarrassing, to be honest with you, for me, and I have avoided a number of foreign visits,” Zebari said in his office in the newly refurbished Foreign Ministry building in central Baghdad.

Ex-premier Iyad Allawi’s Iraqiya bloc finished first in the March 7 polls with 91 seats in the 325-member Parliament, with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s State of Law alliance winning 89.

Both, however, fell short of a parliamentary majority, and negotiations over assembling a coalition with other parties appear to have stalled.

A parliamentary session scheduled for Tuesday, only the second since the elections, was postponed indefinitely, with representatives of the various parties noting that no agreement had been reached.

“We must stop this drift. The government is working, it is functioning. It is not purely a caretaker government. At the same time, it doesn’t take serious strategic decisions – major agreements, major contracting, war and peace.”

Asked whether many such decisions had been taken since the start of the year, he replied simply: “No.”

In a further sign of a worsening security situation, militants killed 23 members of Iraq’s security forces across the country Thursday in a combination of shootings and roadside bombs that was a bitter demonstration of the dangers Iraqi forces still face.

The worst attack came in Baghdad’s Sunni neighborhood of Azamiyah when 16 Iraqi security troops died in what appeared to have been coordinated killings by militants in a bold, daylight attack in the neighborhood that was once an insurgent stronghold, Iraqi police and army officials said.

The Azamiyah attack came on what was already a deadly day for Iraq’s security forces.